Jaundice, Gall-stones, Enlargements, Tumours, and Cancer, and their Treatment.
JAUNDICE.
IF anyone shall maintain that Jaundice is not a greater disease of the liver, but a minor one, I shall reply, Then such a one has never had the curious complaint. Jaundice was the indirect efforts at independent thought in medicine; it was in this wise:- A student was working with Professor H with the microscope while he had a bad cold in his head-in the hot trickling dewdrop stage-and finding that microscopizing under the circumstances was not an easy matter, he said to his professorial friend, “What’s good for a cold in the head?”
“Oh,” said he, “sniff up cold water into your nostrils- that’ll cure it quickly.”
Studiosus set his microscope aside; went home. Once there, forthwith sniffed cold water most diligently into his nostrils, and cured the said coryza there and then. A sweet cure! as the sequel shewed.
The next day he had the beginning symptoms of catarrhal jaundice, and in two days the affection was well-established.
Professor H. was again consulted, and said he must give up hospital work at once, and take a holiday in the hills.
Being conversant with all the facts of the case, it occured to me that as catarrhal jaundice was due to a catarrh of the gall-ducts, just as the coryza was a catarrh of the nose, so if we could only get at the gall-ducts as readily as at the nostrils, we might wash them out also, and thus cure the jaundice, as the coryza had been cured.
I have had a certain number of colds in the head to treat during the years that have since elapsed, but I have never recommended Professor H.’s plan of sniffing cold water into the nostrils, believing a catarrh of the nose to be less bad than a corresponding state of the gall-ducts. This simple narration really touches at the very foundations of all curing : The young man was not well; nature sought to rid his organism of something harmful to his organismic self; she set up a watery discharge from a small portion of the mucous lining of the body, near the surface and not otherwise too much functionally occupied. This hot running from the nose was really a curative expression of the organism. (The young man had been long living and working in the most foul atmosphere of dissecting rooms and hospital wards). The cold water stopped it (the flux, not the disease,) and then nature fell back upon the liver, as she so often does.
Centrifugal fluxes and discharges should not be lightly stopped.
Why the flux? Whence the discharge? Let the questions of the why? and whence? be answered as we go along. Here I merely insist upon the elementary truth that a morbid process having a, perhaps, time-honored name, may be nevertheless no disease at all, but merely a means of cure set up by nature herself, and that there are diseases which it is disadvantageous or dangerous to cure, that is to cure in the sense in which the verb to cure is commonly used in English by the thoughtless. Of course to effect a really radical cure of any primary disease can never be other than a gain to the individual.
CASE OF CATARRHAL JAUNDICE
CURED BY Chelidonium majus.
A good many years since I was summoned to see a country gentleman for sudden indisposition. It was a rather tedious railway journey, and a humble friend of the family, anxious to enlighten me, told me that the squire had the “Yeller Janders.” Yellow the patient was, indeed, and the colour was from jaundice! There were the usual symptoms- constipation, scanty urine of a dark yellow browny colour, and debility with depression of spirits. Chelidonium majus in small material doses, put matters right in a few days, leaving the patient, however, weak.
“What medicine have you been giving my husband?”
“A new remedy.”
“What’s it’s name.”
“Chelidonium majus.”
“What’s the English of that?”
“The greater Celandine.”
“Then it is not by any means a new remedy, for it is in my old Herbal, in which it is recommended for jaundice.”
And so it was: the use of the greater Celandine in jaundice has trickled down to us through the ages from the primary source of the doctrine of signatures.
Of Chelidonium majus, I would say that it is in this country the greatest liver medicine we have and there is, in all conscience, no lack of hepatics. Some of my early success in practice was due to my use of Chelidonium.
It came about thus: I went to see and important lady for a well-known physician in the north, he being too busy to attend, but said lady strongly objected to new doctors. She took a look at me- as I subsequently learned- from a position where she herself was invisible to me, and did not like the look of me. So I was sent away with many apologies from the daughter. Her hepatalgia was easier just at that moment; she would wait till her own physician would come.
A few days later the pain in her right side became unbearable, and said physician again sent me. This time I was admitted and found her in very great pain in the hepatic region; she had it at intervals for very many years- about thirty years, if I remember rightly. The liver was very much enlarged and the pains very acute; there was no jaundice, the tongue mapped.
I mixed some Chelidonium majus and had it given pretty frequently: it eased the pain more promptly than ever the pain had been relieved before, and finally cured it altogether. Her whole life was changed. To make amends for having refused to see me on my first calling upon her she presented me with a piece of plate, and sent me subsequently very many of her suffering friends.
So einflusserich was this venerable dame that I feel her practical influence to this very day.
This cure, and its gratifying results to a struggling young doctor, fixed my attention a good deal upon Chelidonium, and upon liver affections, which are everywhere so common; and it has been my lot to relieve or cure a very large number of liver diseases- and from this wide experience I now write.
My first real acquaintance with Chelidonium was from Dr. Richard Hughes’s “Pharmacodynamics,” a work to which I owe so much, and which I sincerely commend to all who wish to understand the actions of drugs.
I would not be too sure of my botanic knowledge, but I have an idea that Chelidonium is the only plant, indigenous to this country, which possesses a yellow juice. That the colour of this juice led to its use in liver diseases on the lines of the doctrine of Signatures the historically competent will hardly deny. That it has a specific affinity for the great gall-organ anyone may verify for himself if he will take a few drachms of the mother tincture in divided doses. It is kindly and gentle in its action which action is fully set up with only a very minute dose, but in as much as my more intimate knowledge of it comes to me from the Rademacherians, I have generally used it in small material doses.
It will be interesting to give Rademacher’s experience with Chelidonium.
He used it as an organ remedy, or in other words on the homoeopathic principle in its elementary form of specificity of – ————————————————————- the organopathy of the Hohenheimians and the specificity of seat of the homoeopaths, in my work entitled “Diseases of the Spleen and Their Remedies Clinically Illustrated” that I may fairly refer my readers hereto in lieu of going over the same ground again here.
RADEMACHER’s USE OF Chelidonium.
Rademacher, with the charming simplicity of really great knowledge, tells us in regard to Chelidonium, that he had long despised it is worthless, and confessedly to his shame, for he remarks that it was a celebrated hepatic remedy in olden times. (See his Erfarhrungs sheillehre, p. 163.)
He then enters into a long dissertation upon its action and comes to the conclusion that it affects the “inner liver.” He says a physician need have no great experience to know that the disease of the liver that in its perfected form shews itself as jaundice, has endless gradations that in every day life and in medical speech are not regarded as jaundice. Still the very slightest degree of the jaundice affection shews itself in the urine by its pale gold colour, and in the skin, particularly in that of the face, by its more or less dirty look. And where there is but little gall in the motions and no icteric discolouration of the skin, it follows that we have in such cases to deal with not merely an obstruction to the outflow of the gall into the duodenum, but with that unknown organ by which the gall is prepared from the blood; this gall-making organ is ill so that bile is not duly prepared at all, and therefore none can be either poured out or absorbed into the skin, or cast out by the urine. This is what Rademacher calls the “inner liver,” not indeed as an anatomical expression, but as a figure of speech to convey to the mind a more or less accurate and concrete conception of the sphere of action of the Chelidonium majus.
This conception of the true sphere of action of Chelidonium is, I think, correct. The cases cited by Rademacher are mostly “bilious fevers.”
Burnett was one of the first to speak about vaccination triggering illness. This was discussed in his book, Vaccinosis, published in 1884. He introduced the remedy Bacillinum. He authored twenty books, including the much loved "Fifty Reason for Being a Homeopath." He was the editor of The Homoeopathic World.